The Andromeda Strain Read online

Chapter 3

 

  CHRISTIANSENKRIKECANCEL THIS LINE CANCEL

  TO READ AS

  KIRKE, CHRISTIAN . 142

  HALL, MARK . L77

  ACCORD THESE MEN ZED KAPPA STATUS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

  END MESSAGE END MESSAGE

  In theory, this cable was also quite routine; its purpose was to name the five members who were being given Zed Kappa status, the code for "OK" status. Unfortunately, however, the machine misprinted one of the names, and failed to reread the entire message. (Normally, when one of the printout units of a secret trunk line miswrote part of a message, the entire message was rewritten, or else it was reread by the computer to certify its corrected form. )

  The message was thus open to doubt. In Washington and elsewhere, a computer expert was called in to confirm the accuracy of the message, by what is called "reverse tracing. " The Washington expert expressed grave concern about the validity of the message since the machine was printing out other minor mistakes, such as "L" when it meant "1. "

  The upshot of all this was that the first two names on the list were accorded status, while the rest were not, pending confirmation.

  ***

  Allison Stone was tired. At her home in the hills overlooking the Stanford campus, she and her husband, the chairman of the Stanford bacteriology department, had held a party for fifteen couples, and everyone had stayed late. Mrs. Stone was annoyed: she had been raised in official Washington, where one's second cup of coffee, offered pointedly without cognac, was accepted as a signal to go home. Unfortunately, she thought, academics did not follow the rules. She had served the second cup of coffee hours ago, and everybody was still there.

  Shortly before one a. m. , the doorbell rang. Answering it, she was surprised to see two military men standing side by side in the night. They seemed awkward and nervous to her, and she assumed they were lost; people often got lost driving through these residential areas at night.

  "May I help you?"

  "I'm sorry to disturb you, ma'am," one said politely. "But is this the residence of Dr. Jeremy Stone?"

  "Yes," she said, frowning slightly. "It is. "

  She looked beyond the two men, to the driveway. A blue military sedan was parked there. Another man was standing by the car; he seemed to be holding something in his hand.

  "Does that man have a gun?" she said.

  "Ma'am," the man said," we must see Dr. Stone at once.

  It all seemed strange to her, and she found herself frightened. She looked across the lawn and saw a fourth man, moving up to the house and looking into the window. In the pale light streaming out onto the lawn, she could distinctly see the rifle in his hands.

  "What's going on?"

  "Ma'am, we don't want to disturb your party. Please call Dr. Stone to the door. "

  "I don't know if--"

  "Otherwise, we will have to go get him," the man said.

  She hesitated a moment, then said, "Wait here. "

  She stepped back and started to close the door, but one man had already slipped into the hall. He stood near the door, erect and very polite, with his hat in his hand. "I'll just wait here, ma'am," he said, and smiled at her.

  She walked back to the party, trying to show nothing to the guests. Everyone was still talking and laughing; the room was noisy and dense with smoke. She found Jeremy in a corner, in the midst of some argument about riots. She touched his shoulder, and he disengaged himself from the group.

  "I know this sounds funny," she said, "but there is some kind of Army man in the hall, and another outside, and two others with guns out on the lawn. They say they want to see you. "

  For a moment, Stone looked surprised, and then he nodded. "I'll take care of it," he said. His attitude annoyed her; he seemed almost to be expecting it.

  "Well, if you knew about this, you might have told--"

  "I didn't," he said. "I'll explain later. "

  He walked out to the hallway, where the officer was still waiting. She followed her husband.

  Stone said, "I am Dr. Stone. "

  "Captain Morton," the man said. He did not offer to shake hands. "There's a fire, sir. "

  "All right," Stone said. He looked down at his dinner jacket. "Do I have time to change?"

  "I'm afraid not, sir. "

  To her astonishment, Allison saw her husband nod quietly. "All right. "

  He turned to her and said, "I've got to leave. " His face was blank and expressionless, and it seemed to her like, a nightmare, his face like that, while he spoke. She was confused, and afraid.

  "When will you be back?"

  "I'm not sure. A week or two. Maybe longer. "

  She tried to keep her voice low, but she couldn't help it, she was upset. "What is it?" she said. "Are you under arrest?"

  "No," he said, with a slight smile. "It's nothing like that. Make my apologies to everyone, will you?"

  "But the guns--"

  "Mrs. Stone," the military man said, "it's our job to protect your husband. From now on, nothing must be allowed to happen to him. "

  "That's right," Stone said. "You see, I'm suddenly an important person. " He smiled again, an odd, crooked smile, and gave her a kiss.

  And then, almost before she knew what was happening, he was walking out the door, with Captain Morton on one side of him and the other man on the other. The man with the rifle wordlessly fell into place behind them; the man by the car saluted and opened the door.

  Then the car lights came on, and the doors slammed shut, and the car backed down the drive and drove off into the night. She was still standing by the door when one of her guests came up behind her and said, "Allison, are you all right?"

  And she turned, and found she was able to smile and say, "Yes, it's nothing. Jeremy had to leave. The lab called him: another one of his late-night experiments going wrong. "

  The guest nodded and said, "Shame. It's a delightful party. "

  In the car, Stone sat back and stared at the men. He recalled that their faces were blank and expressionless. He said, "What have you got for me?"

  "Got, sir?"

  "Yes, dammit. What did they give you for me? They must have given you something. "

  "Oh. Yes sir. "

  He was handed a slim file. Stenciled on the brown cardboard cover was PROJECT SUMMARY: SCOOP.

  "Nothing else?" Stone said.

  "No sir. "

  Stone sighed. He had never heard of Project Scoop before; the file would have to be read carefully. But it was too dark in the car to read; there would be time for that later, on the airplane. He found himself thinking back over the last five years, back to the rather odd symposium on Long Island, and the rather odd little speaker from England who had, in his own way, begun it all.

  ***

  In the summer of 1962, J. J. Merrick, the English biophysicist, presented a paper to the Tenth Biological Symposium at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. The paper was entitled "Frequencies of Biologic Contact According to Speciation Probabilities. " Merrick was a rebellious, unorthodox scientist whose reputation for clear thinking was not enhanced by his recent divorce or the presence of the handsome blond secretary he had brought with him to the symposium. Following the presentation of his paper, there was little serious discussion of Merrick's ideas, which were summarized at the end of the paper.

  ***

  I must conclude that the first contact with extraterrestrial life will be determined by the known probabilities of speciation. It is an undeniable fact that complex organisms are rare on earth, while simple organisms flourish in abundance. There are millions of species of bacteria, and thousands of species of insects. There are only a few species of primates, and only four of great apes. There is but one species of man.

  With this frequency of speciation goes a corresponding frequency in n
umbers. Simple creatures are much more common than complex organisms. There are three billion men on the earth, and that seems a great many until we consider that ten or even one hundred times that number of first contact would consist of a plague brought back from the bacteria can be contained within a large flask.

  All available evidence on the origin of life points to an evolutionary progression from simple to complex life forms. This is true on earth. It is probably true throughout the universe. Shapley, Merrow, and others have calculated the number of viable planetary systems in the near universe. My own calculations, indicated earlier in the paper, consider the relative abundance of different organisms throughout the universe.

  My aim has been to determine the probability of contact between man and another life form. That probability is as follows:

  FORM: PROBABILITY

  Unicellular organisms or less (naked genetic in formation): . 7840

  Multicellular organisms, simple: . 1940

  Multicellular organisms, complex but lacking coordinated central nervous system: . 0140

  Multicellular organisms with integrated organ systems including nervous system: . 0018

  Multicellular organisms with complex nervous system capable of handling 7+ data (human capability): . 0002

  TOTAL: 1. 0000

  ***

  These considerations lead me to believe that the first human interaction with extraterrestrial life will consist of contact with organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria or viruses. The consequences of such contact are disturbing when one recalls that 3 per cent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man.

  ***

 

  Later, Merrick himself considered the possibility that the first contact would consist of a plague brought back from the moon by the first men to go there. This idea was received with amusement by the assembled scientists.

  One of the few who took it seriously was Jeremy Stone. At the age of thirty-six, Stone was perhaps the most famous person attending the symposium that year. He was professor of bacteriology at Berkeley, a post he had held since he was thirty, and he had just won the Nobel Prize.

  The list of Stone's achievements-- disregarding the particular series of experiments that led to the Nobel Prize-- is astonishing. In 1955, he was the first to use the technique of multiplicative counts for bacterial colonies. In 1957, he developed a method for liquid-pure suspension. In 1960, Stone presented a radical new theory of operon activity in E. coli and S. tabuh, and developed evidence for the physical nature of the inducer and repressor substances. His 1958 paper on linear viral transformations opened broad new lines of scientific inquiry, particularly among the Pasteur Institute group in Paris, which subsequently won the Nobel Prize in 1966.

  In 1961, Stone himself won the Nobel Prize. The award was given for work on bacterial mutant reversion that he had done in his spare time as a law student at Michigan, when he was twenty-six.

  Perhaps the most significant thing about Stone was that he had done Nobel-caliber work as a law student, for it demonstrated the depth and range of his interests. A friend once said of him: "Jeremy knows everything, and is fascinated by I the rest. " Already he was being compared to Einstein and to Bohr as a scientist with a conscience, an overview, an appreciation of the significance of events.

  Physically, Stone was a thin, balding man with a prodigious memory that catalogued scientific facts and blue jokes with equal facility. But his most outstanding characteristic was a sense of impatience, the feeling he conveyed to every one around him that they were wasting his time. He had a bad habit of interrupting speakers and finishing conversations, a habit he tried to control with only limited success. His imperious manner, when added to the fact that he had won the Nobel Prize at an early age, as well as the scandals of his private life-- he was four times married, twice to the wives of colleagues-- did nothing to increase his popularity.

  Yet it was Stone who, in the early 1960's, moved forward in government circles as one of the spokesmen for the new scientific establishment. He himself regarded this role with tolerant amusement-- a vacuum eager to be filled with hot gas, " he once said-- but in fact his influence was considerable.

  By the early 1960's America had reluctantly come to realize that it possessed, as a nation, the most potent scientific complex in the history of the world. Eighty per cent of all scientific discoveries in the preceding three decades had been made by Americans. The United States had 75 per cent of the world's computers, and 90 per cent of the world's lasers. The United States had three and a half times as many scientists as the Soviet Union and spent three and a half times as much money on research; the U. S. had four times as many scientists as the European Economic Community and spent seven times as much on research. Most of this money came, directly or indirectly, from Congress, and Congress felt a great need for men to advise them on how to spend it.

  During the 1950's, all the great advisers had been physicists: Teller and Oppenheimer and Bruckman and Weidner. But ten years later, with more money for biology and more concern for it, a new group emerged, led by DeBakey in Houston, Farmer in Boston, Heggerman in New York, and Stone in California.

  Stone's prominence was attributable to many factors: the prestige of the Nobel Prize; his political contacts; his most recent wife, the daughter of Senator Thomas Wayne of Indiana; his legal training. All this combined to assure Stone's repeated appearance before confused Senate subcommittees-- and gave him the power of any trusted adviser.

  It was this same power that he used so successfully to implement the research and construction leading to Wildfire.

  ***

  Stone was intrigued by Merrick's ideas, which paralleled certain concepts of his own. He explained these in a short paper entitled "Sterilization of Spacecraft," printed in Science and later reprinted in the British journal Nature. The argument stated that bacterial contamination was a two-edged sword, and that man must protect against both edges.

  Previous to Stone's paper, most discussion of contamination dealt with the hazards to other planets of satellites and probes inadvertently carrying earth organisms. This problem was considered early in the American space effort; by 1959, NASA had set strict regulations for sterilization of earth origin probes.

  The object of these regulations was to prevent contamination of other worlds. Clearly, if a probe were being sent to Mars or Venus to search for new life forms, it would defeat the purpose of the experiment for the probe to carry earth bacteria with it.

  Stone considered the reverse situation. He stated that it was equally possible for extraterrestrial organisms to contaminate the earth via space probes. He noted that spacecraft that burned up in reentry presented no problem, but "live" returns-- manned flights, and probes such as the Scoop satellites-- were another matter entirely. Here, he said, the question of contamination was very great.

  His paper created a brief flurry of interest but, as he later said, "nothing very spectacular. " Therefore, in 1963 he began an informal seminar group that met twice monthly in Room 410, on the top floor of the University of California Medical School biochemistry wing, for lunch and discussion of the contamination problem. It was this group of five men: Stone and John Black of Berkeley, Samuel Holden and Terence Lisset of Stanford Med, and Andrew Weiss of Stanford biophysics-- that eventually formed the early nucleus of the Wildfire Project. They presented a petition to the President in 1964, in a letter consciously patterned after the Einstein letter to Roosevelt, in 1940, concerning the atomic bomb.

  ***

  University of California

  Berkeley, Calif.

  June 10, 1964

  The President of the United States

 

  The White House

  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

  Washington, D. C.

  Dear Mr. Presi
dent:

  Recent theoretical considerations suggest that sterilization procedures of returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee sterile reentry to this planet's atmosphere. The consequence of this is the potential introduction of virulent organisms into the present terrestrial ecologic framework.

  It is our belief that sterilization for reentry probes and manned capsules can never be wholly satisfactory. Our calculations suggest that even if capsules received sterilizing procedures in space, the probability of contamination would still remain one in ten thousand, and perhaps much more. These estimates are based upon organized life as we know it; other forms of life may be entirely resistant to our sterilizing methods.

  We therefore urge the establishment of a facility designed to deal with an extraterrestrial life form, should one inadvertently be introduced to the earth. The purpose of this facility would be twofold: to limit dissemination of the life form, and to provide laboratories for its investigation and analysis, with a view to protecting earth life forms from its influence.

  We recommend that such a facility be located in an uninhabited region of the United States; that it be constructed underground; that it incorporate all known isolation techniques; and that it be equipped with a nuclear device for self-destruction in the eventuality of an emergency. So far as we know, no form of life can survive the two million degrees of heat which accompany an atomic nuclear detonation.

  Yours very truly,

  Jeremy Stone

  John Black

  Samuel Holden

  Terence Lisset

  Andrew Weiss

  ***

  Response to the letter was gratifyingly prompt. Twenty-four hours later, Stone received a call from one of the President's advisers, and the following day he flew to Washington to confer with the President and members of the National Security Council. Two weeks after that, he flew to Houston to discuss further plans with NASA officials.

  Although Stone recalls one or two cracks about "the goddam penitentiary for bugs," most scientists he talked with regarded the project favorably. Within a month, Stone's informal team was hardened into an official committee to study problems of contamination and draw up recommendations.

  This committee was put on the Defense Department's Advance Research Projects List and funded through the Defense Department. At that time, the ARPL was heavily invested in chemistry and physics-- ion sprays, reversal duplication, pi-meson substrates-- but there was growing interest in biologic problems. Thus one ARPL group was concerned with electronic pacing of brain function (a euphemism for mind control); a second had prepared a study of biosynergics, the future possible combinations of man and machines implanted inside the body; still another was evaluating Project Ozma, the search for extraterrestrial life conducted in 1961-4. A fourth group was engaged in preliminary design of a machine that would carry out all human functions and would be self-duplicating.

  All these projects were highly theoretical, and all were staffed by prestigious scientists. Admission to the ARPL was a mark of considerable status, and it ensured future funds for implementation and development.

  Therefore, when Stone's committee submitted an early draft of the Life Analysis Protocol, which detailed the way any living thing could be studied, the Defense Department responded with an outright appropriation of $22,000,000 for the construction of a special isolated laboratory. (This rather large sum was felt to be justified since the project had application to other studies already under way. In 1965, the whole field of sterility and contamination was one of major importance. For example, NASA was building a Lunar Receiving Laboratory, a high-security facility for Apollo astronauts returning from the moon and possibly carrying bacteria or viruses harmful to man. Every astronaut returning from the moon would be quarantined in the LRL for three weeks, until decontamination was complete. Further, the problems of "clean rooms" of industry, where dust and bacteria were kept at a minimum, and the "sterile chambers" under study at Bethesda, were also major. Aseptic environments, "life islands," and sterile support systems seemed to have great future significance, and Stone's appropriation was considered a good investment in all these fields. )

  Once money was funded, construction proceeded rapidly. The eventual result, the Wildfire Laboratory, was built in 1966 in Flatrock, Nevada. Design was awarded to the naval architects of the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics, since GD had considerable experience designing living quarters on atomic submarines, where men had to live and work for prolonged periods.

  The plan consisted of a conical underground structure with five floors. Each floor was circular, with a central service core of wiring, plumbing, and elevators. Each floor was more sterile than the one above; the first floor was non-sterile, the second moderately sterile, the third stringently sterile, and so on. Passage from one floor to another was not free; personnel had to undergo decontamination and quarantine procedures in passing either up or down.

  Once the laboratory was finished, it only remained to select the Wildfire Alert team, the group of scientists who would study any new organism. After a number of studies of team composition, five men were selected, including Jeremy Stone himself. These five were prepared to mobilize immediately in the event of a biologic emergency.

  Barely two years after his letter to the President, Stone was satisfied that "this country has the capability to deal with an unknown biologic agent. " He professed himself pleased with the response of Washington and the speed with which his ideas had been implemented. But privately, he admitted to friends that it had been almost too easy, that Washington had agreed to his plans almost too readily.

  Stone could not have known the reasons behind Washington's eagerness, or the very real concern many government officials had for the problem. For Stone knew nothing, until the night he left the party and drove off in the blue military sedan, of Project Scoop.

  ***

  "It was the fastest thing we could arrange, sir," the Army man said.

  Stone stepped onto the airplane with a sense of absurdity. It was a Boeing 727, completely empty, the seats stretching back in long unbroken rows.

  "Sit, first class, if you like," the Army man said, with a slight smile. "It doesn't matter. " A moment later he was gone. He was not replaced by a stewardess but by a stern MP with a pistol on his hip who stood by the door as the engines started, whining softly in the night.

  Stone sat back with the Scoop file in front of him and began to read. It made fascinating reading; he went through it quickly, so quickly that the MP thought his passenger must be merely glancing at the file. But Stone was reading every word.

  Scoop was the brainchild of Major General Thomas Sparks, head of the Army Medical Corps, Chemical and Biological Warfare Division. Sparks was responsible for the research of the CBW installations at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Harley, Indiana, and Dugway, Utah. Stone had met him once or twice, and remembered him as being mild-mannered and bespectacled. Not the sort of man to be expected in the job he held.

  Reading on, Stone learned that Project Scoop was contracted to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1963. Its avowed aim was the collection of any organisms that might exist in "near space, " the upper atmosphere of the earth. Technically speaking, it was an Army project, but it was funded through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a supposedly civilian organization. In fact, NASA was a government agency with a heavy military commitment; 43 per cent of its contractual work was classified in 1963.

  In theory, JPL was designing a satellite to enter the fringes of space and collect organisms and dust for study. This was considered a project of pure science-- almost curiosity-- and was thus accepted by all the scientists working on the study.

  In fact, the true aims were quite different.

  The true aims of Scoop were to find new life forms that might benefit the Fort Detrick p
rogram. In essence, it was a study to discover new biological weapons of war.

  Detrick was a rambling structure in Maryland dedicated to the discovery of chemical-and-biological-warfare weapons. Covering 1,300 acres, with a physical plant valued at $100,000,000, it ranked as one of the largest research facilities of any kind in the United States. Only 15 per cent of its findings were published in open scientific journals; the rest were classified, as were the reports from Harley and Dugway. Harley was a maximum-security installation that dealt largely with viruses. In the previous ten years, a number of new viruses had been developed there, ranging from the variety coded Carrie Nation (which produces diarrhea) to the variety coded Arnold (which causes clonic seizures and death). The Dugway Proving Ground in Utah was larger than the state of Rhode Island and was used principally to test poison gases such as Tabun, Sklar, and Kuff-11.

  Few Americans, Stone knew, were aware of the magnitude of U. S. research into chemical and biological warfare. The total government expenditure in CBW exceeded half a billion dollars a year. Much of this was distributed to academic centers such as Johns Hopkins, Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, where studies of weapons systems were contracted under vague terms. Sometimes, of course, the terms were not so vague. The Johns Hopkins program was devised to evaluate "studies of actual or potential injuries and illnesses, studies on diseases of potential biological-warfare significance, and evaluation of certain chemical and immunological responses to certain toxoids and vaccines. "

  In the past eight years, none of the results from Johns Hopkins had been published openly. Those from other universities, such as Chicago and UCLA, had occasionally been published, but these were considered within the military establishment to be "trial balloons"-- examples of ongoing research intended to intimidate foreign observers. A classic was the paper by Tendron and five others entitled "Researches into a Toxin Which Rapidly Uncouples Oxidative Phosphorylation Through Cutaneous Absorption. "

  The paper described, but did not identify, a poison that would kill a person in less than a minute and was absorbed through the skin. It was recognized that this was a relatively minor achievement compared to other toxins that had been devised in recent years.

  With so much money and effort going into CBW, one might think that new and more virulent weapons would be continuously perfected. However, this was not the case from 1961 to 1965; the conclusion of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee in 1961 was that "conventional research has been less than satisfactory" and that "new avenues and approaches of inquiry" should be opened within the field.

  That was precisely what Major General Thomas Sparks intended to do, with Project Scoop.

  In final form, Scoop was a program to orbit seventeen satellites around the earth, collecting organisms and bringing them back to the surface. Stone read the summaries of each previous flight.

  Scoop I was a gold-plated satellite, cone-shaped, weighing thirty-seven pounds fully equipped. It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Purisima, California, on March 12, 1966. Vandenberg is used for polar (north to south) orbits, as opposed to Cape Kennedy, which launches west to east; Vandenberg had the additional advantage of maintaining better secrecy than Kennedy.

  Scoop I orbited for six days before being brought down. It landed successfully in a swamp near Athens, Georgia. Unfortunately, it was found to contain only standard earth organisms.

  Scoop II burned up in reentry, as a result of instrumentation failure. Scoop III also burned up, though it had a new type of plastic-and-tungsten-laminate heat shield.

  Scoops IV and V were recovered intact from the Indian Ocean and the Appalachian foothills, but neither contained radically new organisms; those collected were harmless variants of S. albus, a common contaminant of normal human skin. These failures led to a further increase in sterilization procedures prior to launch.

  Scoop VI was launched on New Year's Day, 1967. It incorporated all the latest refinements from earlier attempts. High hopes rode with the revised satellite, which returned eleven days later, landing near Bombay, India. Unknown to anyone, the 34th Airborne, then stationed in Evreux, France, just outside Paris, was dispatched to recover the capsule. The 34th was on alert whenever a spaceflight went up, according to the procedures of Operation Scrub, a plan first devised to protect Mercury and Gemini capsules should one be forced to land in Soviet Russia or Eastern Bloc countries. Scrub was the primary reason for keeping a single paratroop division in Western Europe in the first half of the 1960's.

  Scoop VI was recovered uneventfully. It was found to contain a previously unknown form of unicellular organism, coccobacillary in shape, gram-negative, coagulase, and triokinase-positive. However, it proved generally benevolent to all living things with the exception of domestic female chickens, which it made moderately ill for a four-day period.

  Among the Detrick staff, hope dimmed for the successful recovery of a pathogen from the Scoop program. Nonetheless, Scoop VII was launched soon after Scoop VI. The exact date is classified but it is believed to be February 5, 1967. Scoop VII immediately went into stable orbit with an apogee of 317 miles and a perigee of 224 miles. It remained in orbit for two and a half days. At that time, the satellite abruptly left stable orbit for unknown reasons, and it was decided to bring it down by radio command.

  The anticipated landing site was a desolate area in northeastern Arizona.

  ***

  Midway through the flight, his reading was interrupted by an officer who brought him a telephone and then stepped a respectful distance away while Stone talked.

  "Yes?" Stone said, feeling odd. He was not accustomed to talking on the telephone in the middle of an airplane trip.

  "General Marcus here," a tired voice said. Stone did not know General Marcus. "I just wanted to inform you that all members of the team have been called in, with the exception of Professor Kirke. "

  "What happened?"